Mechanical Marvellous (2024)
Digital Film from 8mm/16mm, Archive & Stereographs from Screen Archive SE and Brighton Museums
4:3, 5’55’’
Plinth 80x40x40cms, wood, brass, antique lens. Constructed by Matt James Healy.
Mechanical Marvellous: a photochemical phantasmagoria.
Journey through the silver halide scenes into an analogue uncanny world of wonder. Gaze into the glass and grain and see what marvels of light, time and dimensions await… and look right back at you.
Collaging archive material from Screen Archive South East with newly shot footage, Goss builds a phantasmagoric world travelling through time, space, colour and dimensions.
Mechanical Marvellous is viewed both by looking up and down. Peering into the hand-crafted rosewood and brass box creates an intimate ‘analogue VR’ experience. Simultaneously, the image seems to mysteriously emanate from the box up onto the ceiling.
Inspired by proto-cinematic techniques such as stereography and the kinetoscope, the work also explores the pioneering work on early colour cinematography happening in Brighton and Hove at the turn of the 20th Century. This includes hand-tinting/toning and the split colour filter techniques of Kinemacolor. Using custom-made prisms and filters on hand-wound clockwork cine cameras, Goss shot new footage around Brighton & Hove on expired 8mm and 16mm Kodachrome, developed using a non-chemical coffee-based developer.
The work reanimates the archive and obsolete technologies, creating new work permeated by layers of time, light, chemicals and memories. It makes links between the cameras and optical devices on display here and modern technology in general. When so many of our devices are seemingly impenetrable black boxes, what might these mechanical marvellous processes tell us about how we see, document and tell stories about the world around us, and how we might shape the future.
Currently exhibiting at Hove Museum as part of the Exhibition Days of Wonder - details here.
Celebrating the magic of early cinema and filmmaking and its spirit of creativity and innovation, Days of Wonder is an exhibition of new work inspired and influenced by the remarkable film and media collections in South East archives. Days of Wonder is part of Brighton Festival 2024.
Corridor and videoclub have commissioned artists to work with the collections, resulting in an exhibition of new artworks, installed as interventions in permanent exhibition galleries. The artists in Days of Wonder are Sapphire Goss, Annis Joslin, Bella Okuya and Connor Turansky.
